Big Data : Building Big Brother’s Evil Empire

Background– The Russell–Einstein Manifesto was issued in London on July 9, 1955 by Bertrand Russell in the midst of the Cold War. It highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and called for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict. The signatories included eleven pre-eminent intellectuals and scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed it just days before his death on April 18, 1955.

It is time Data Scientists most of whom have tacitly accepted that open source and open societies are movements for good, come together and stop enabling Big Brothers in China, India and United States from accumulating lifetimes of information on the citizens of the Internet. Does the 21st Century need a better equipped and enabled United Nations to deal with climate change, weather weapons and cyber warfare. While the myth of Anglo Saxon unipolar world is dead, renegade elements from the military industrial complex from both the West and East threaten the peace with illegal and unethical spying on citizens and civilians.

As data scientists, we enable them , these Governments with the new cyber nukes to collect, sort, aggregate, visualize , huge amounts of text data. I bet the NSA and China use Hadoop and R for purposes that are both repulsive and illegal. Now you can join the gravy train, and earn big money working for one, or the other, or even both.

Or we can come up with a newer version of Russell- Einstein manifesto for Big Data and Internet. The military industrial complex of the East and West has screwed the real planet enough. Why screw the cyber -world of Internet by these weapons of mass collection? Using Python, R, SAS, JMP, or using regression, k means, map reduce/. Data scientists should have a conscience before they fire their code.